Wildcat Creek undergoes about as radical a transformation as a stream can, from its start in the Berkeley Hills to the tidal lowlands of Richmond, where it flows to San Pablo Bay. Beginning as an unassuming little stream near the 1,900-foot summit of Vollmer Peak, in most places it is no more than 10 or 15 feet wide as it cuts through laurel- and oak-shaded, steep-sided canyons in Tilden and Wildcat Canyon Regional Parks. In its protected upper sections, Wildcat still has excellent spawning and rearing habitat, and is said to harbor some rainbow trout transplanted from Oakland’s Redwood Creek in the 1980s.
But if you are a salmonid in the Bay—a steelhead, or a coho or chinook salmon—looking to swim up the creek like your ancestors once did, good luck getting there. Where Wildcat flows into its former estuary, the creek has been remade, like so many Bay Area waterways, to conform to the urban and industrial terrain around it—buried under freeways and parking lots and routed into culverts and concrete channels. This is not to mention the heaps of trash that blight large portions of the creek, flushed out by way of storm drains or dumped illegally.
Despite the creek’s chronic problems, local leaders have long viewed Wildcat’s restoration (and that of San Pablo Creek, which flows parallel to Wildcat and less than a mile north of it) as the centerpiece of an ambitious environmental and economic renewal in this long-disadvantaged area. And after four decades of fits and starts, that revitalization is finally beginning to gain momentum, with $3.8 million from two new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grants.
“We have been working very hard to make sure that the human element and the community benefit from investment in this part of the creek is very explicit—and that it actually gets funded,” says Juliana Gonzalez, executive director of the The Watershed Project in Richmond, one of the grant recipients. She says that past plans for restoration of the lower sections of Wildcat Creek promised improvements to the creekside greenbelt—but those promises fell by the wayside. Gonzalez hopes that this latest infusion of funds will not only create better habitat for fish, but begin to heal the damage wrought to local communities by years of neglect. “We want a much better trail. We want a viewpoint. We want people to see what these millions of dollars of investment is getting them.”
The recent transformation of lower Wildcat Creek began in earnest in 2021, when the city of San Pablo restored nearly a half-mile of Wildcat Creek. It continued in June 2023, with the two EPA grants for Wildcat, which came from its San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund, using Bipartisan Infrastructure Law money that’s meant for disadvantaged communities. A million dollars of the money was awarded to The Watershed Project, which is overseeing the creation of two new community groups that will design and implement a watershed action plan for the creek. The money will also be used to hire local residents to conduct restoration work. Another $2.8 million grant is going to the Contra Costa Flood Control District, to redesign Wildcat Creek’s flood-control channel in North Richmond.
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The funds will not only provide a long-needed infrastructure fix, say experts, but will also be a major step towards connecting the lower watershed to its protected upper reaches and making the creek a better place for steelhead, wildlife, and residents.
Wildcat’s unmaking, like that of many other Bay Area creeks, was a consequence of the uneven and often discriminatory patterns of urban growth in the Bay Area. Black workers who came from the South to work in Richmond’s naval shipyards during World War II were forced into housing in flood-prone reaches of the lower watershed. To this day, these working-class communities of color are among the poorest in the Bay Area and are burdened with a crush of industry including dozens of factories, a garbage dump, and the Bay Area’s largest and dirtiest refinery.
On the lower stretches of the creek, rangers are a rare sight and amenities for recreationists are scant. Because much of Wildcat Creek in this area is hard to access and infrequently used, it has become a magnet for homeless encampments, illegal dumping, and other questionable activities. “You have big piles of sediment where people are riding motorcycles and hiding behind them,” Gonzales says. “It creates unsafe situations for moms that want to walk around with their babies in strollers. It’s like, what are we trying to do here?”
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According to noted creek restorationist and author Ann Riley, the Wildcat Creek restoration was conceived of as a way to mitigate flooding but also as a new model for beautifying disadvantaged communities in which residents had a central role. “The whole idea was for a bottom-to-top planning process for determining the future of the community,” Riley says.
Local leaders, she says, remained committed to restoring the creek in as natural a state as possible. “Their commitment to the recreational, aesthetic, and environmental values of the creek were astonishing, despite the fact that the creeks were sort of making their lives miserable,” she says. Wildcat “became a national model, where flood control and environmental restoration were not mutually exclusive objectives.”
There have been tantalizing signs of rejuvenation as restoration has proceeded. In 2022, a former student from Salesian High School in Richmond captured a cellphone video of what appeared to be an adult steelhead holding in a section of creek near the school.
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“It was just for an instant,” says Elzabeth Coscia, a biology teacher at Salesian High. “It was there and gone … It was so exciting. But that was two years ago, and I haven’t seen anything since.”
The video circulated among a small but dedicated group of activists and community members including Peter Mangarella of Trout Unlimited’s East Bay Chapter, who saw the fish as an auspicious sign that past efforts might finally be paying off. When a large enough volume of water is flowing through the creek in winter and spring, says Mangarella, steelhead can potentially negotiate the lower watershed. “This one did,” he adds. “That’s the only [salmonid] that I’m aware of. But I suspect that there have been others.”
A single 400-foot section of Wildcat Creek in North Richmond has long plagued the fish, and the people living alongside the waterway. Here, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers routed the creek through a concrete flood-control channel designed to shuttle water as quickly as possible from the creek towards the Bay. It was built after major rain storms and flooding in 1982 devastated low-lying areas of Richmond and San Pablo and killed 33 people statewide.
But the engineering work created problems nearly as severe as the ones it was meant to solve. It became a trap for sediment and debris and a magnet for homeless encampments. In the heaviest of rains, the obstructed channel can be overwhelmed and send floodwaters into surrounding neighborhoods, as it did in December of 2005.
The structure’s fish ladder has become an impassable obstruction. This small, square passage is incised into the larger concrete channel and is interspersed with alternating concrete baffles, like the teeth of a zipper. The small spaces between the baffles are meant to provide fish with small pockets of calm water out of the swift main current as they make their way upstream.
It soon became apparent that the ladder could not handle the heavy load of sediment carried by the creek, and filled up with dirt and debris from the hills above. Occasionally, a legion of volunteers would emerge to try to clean it out, with shovels or excavators, and it would fill up again immediately.
Now, Contra Costa Flood Control District engineers Sara Duckler and Tim Jensen are overseeing a redesign of this channel. On a cloudy day in March, we park at Verde Elementary school and walk over a small bridge. The short section adjacent to the school is lovely, flowing dark with sediment beneath the outstretched limbs of tall trees. Small ceramic tiles—replete with colorful trees, dragonflies, flowers—adorn the bridge’s supports. These were made by Verde Elementary students and illustrate the creek’s ecology. The scene changes markedly as we proceed down the muddy path. A man wearing a ski mask rides a rusty bike while brandishing a metal pipe. A compact car, by the looks of it abandoned, languishes in a weedy lot adjacent to the trail. Two massive piles of dirt—piles of sediment removed over the years from the streambed—tower over the creek bed.
We soon arrive at the concrete channel. Roughly ten-foot walls are covered in riotous scrawls of graffiti. Several makeshift tarp-and-plastic shelters perch along a small bluff. Recent storms had swelled the creek and, consequently, the water in the channel is too swift and deep for us to walk upstream without waders to see the fish ladder itself. Based on the heaps of mud and woody debris at the channel’s terminus, however, it is safe to assume that the structure is entirely clogged.
“To get a creek configured to move sediment through instead of just settling out and blocking it is a big engineering challenge,” said Duckler, gesturing to the manmade streambed. She explains that the new design will not eliminate the concrete but should move water more efficiently through the channel and prevent sediment from settling out in the fish ladder. “We’re going to have these little waterfalls with pools, which will hopefully scour it out and keep the sediment moving through.”
Juliana Gonzalez of the Watershed Project says the flood-control structure fix needs to do more than move sediment: it needs to make the creek a safer place for people. She says that past plans for the embattled flood channel have prioritized engineering fixes over human amenities, and her coalition is pushing to provide pedestrians with a better trail and a park next to Verde Elementary. “We have a lot of moms who bring their little kids to the school with their older siblings, and they need a space for the toddlers to hang out.”
On the downstream side of the flood channel, the creek fanned out into its wide sediment basin, forming multiple channels. The floodplain is littered with a jarring array of flotsam—tires, couch frames, shopping carts, shards of wood and sections of plastic piping. But Jensen says he is encouraged by the absence of plastic bags, Styrofoam and plastic water bottles. “That used to be a big problem,” he said, adding that most of the cities in the watershed now have a plastic bag ban and a Styrofoam ban. “That has helped a lot.”
For years, Wildcat, the surrounding community, and any anadromous fish that show up have suffered a poorly designed concrete fish passage that isn’t very passable. Now, a new grant is meant to change that; Wildcat’s fish passage will remain concrete. But its new version has been designed to move sediment through more swiftly. (Trout Unlimited)
Jensen traces a hand across the expanse and notes that the fact that the area is covered in trash is, in fact, evidence of its effectiveness. “Having a sediment basin allows the debris to collect here versus going further downstream and into the bay,” he said. “It doesn’t look so nice. But it makes it easier to pick up.”
The problem, however, is that the basin has not been excavated for over a decade. This will be one of the first orders of business when construction begins next year. More frequent cleanups will also be part of the new watershed management plan.
When you are standing in Wildcat’s most troubled section, it can be difficult to imagine that a steelhead could someday swim up these waters to spawn in the shade of the overhanging oaks and laurels in Wildcat and Tilden parks. But the upcoming project and watershed action plan may be the most important step yet in the 40-year effort to reinvigorate this long neglected waterway and the communities that surround it.
“It’s been a long process,” Duckler said. But the benefits of the work, she says, will pay off incrementally, decade by decade. “It takes a long time to turn the ship.”
